When We Talk About Love
by Rabid Angel
Summary: Five things that Nyota Uhura knew about Spock that no one else did.


**A/N:** I can get behind just about any pairing of the bridge love square- Kirk/McCoy, Kirk/Spock, Kirk/Uhura, McCoy/Uhura, but Spock/Uhura is one that I've been utterly captivated by and therefore inspired to try. This prompt came from the kink meme at LJ, and though I've never before written a five things prompt, something awful happened- my innate need to make every work of writing into an emotional masterpiece took it from the original intention of five short vignettes to a sprawling, full-fledged one-shot. This fic is one of three fics keeping me from Garden Variety- the other two are Not Sad, which is up (wink wink, nudge nudge) on this site, and a yet unpublished fic about Jim's fear of dying that's halfway done. Garden Variety will get done, I promise, but I need to get this out of my system. Writing about love is very much more more style than any other fic I've submitted to this site, and so I'm excited to publish this. I hope that you enjoy it, and I'd love to hear what you think.

**When We Talk About Love**

**By: Rabid Angel**

Of the peculiar, haphazardly assembled family bound by camaraderie and shared experience that they refer to as a crew, he is without the remote shadow of a doubt the most private member. Some (or rather one, whose notoriously conspicuous identity is far from mysterious) prefer to air their metaphorical dirty laundry from corner to corner of the deceptively expansive ship, others limit their privileged digressions to anecdotes of wild past experiences, and yet from the day she first encountered him in an academy classroom, he has remained unfailingly and infuriatingly tight-lipped as to anything of a distantly personal nature.

As such, she spends years attempting to squeeze from him even the most miniscule trace of a life beyond astrophysical calculations and linear algebraic equations, and while what little he reveals to her, his most privileged confidante, is fragmented and devoid of any emotion whatsoever, it's enough. While their academic relationship blossoms into an enriching friendship and later evolves, like a phoenix bursting into flame only to rise again, into an amorous liaison passionate enough to span the starry cosmos in a love story for generations to come, his tongue hesitantly loosens to let slip the title of his favorite book, the amusing story of the scar on the back of his left hand, even the fact that clowns unsettle him (because fear would be grossly illogical).

And so, she learns. After all, she has always been nothing but an avid student. She absorbs each and every personal tidbit that he divulges in quantities that increase with every day that passes, the infrastructure of his tentative trust developing by leaps and bounds to strengthen into a resolute, fortified faith within her. He trusts that what he reveals to her is kept in the strictest and most clandestine of confidences, and she is all too happy to acquiesce. Space unfolds before them in vastly infinitesimal, inky peals of hushed darkness like an intricately creased work of origami, and their love unfurls and builds in much the same manner.

While she yearns for _more_ from him, for stories of his childhood and for the disclosure of his inner monologue like the exchange of her deepest, darkest secrets at the sleepovers of her girlhood, she recognizes his inability to open up as simply a building block of the man she loves, and so she does not push the subject. She shares her life story, her emotions, her thoughts, and her aspirations for the future as a means of hopeful encouragement, but no matter how ardently and helplessly she wishes for it, she expects nothing in return.

And so, when the hard-won deluge at last arrives and the volume of his bashful, blushing confessions increases to make her feel genuinely as though she is his true other half, she finds herself pleasantly astonished and utterly delighted. His honesty is shy and hopelessly sweet, the almost-levity in his impossibly dark eyes something akin to strangely becoming, and what she learns not only satisfies her previously insatiable lust for an even exchange, but fills a dismal absence in their burgeoning relationship that she hadn't known to exist.

He trusts her with an implicit, unwavering faith of such purity and privilege that she is left astounded, but as he comes to increasingly confide within her and their metaphysical bond fortifies itself with each passing day, she discovers that she is honored in that she knows more about him than anyone else could so much as dream to know. Like a flower growing from a miniscule seed to a strong, vibrant blossom, her knowledge of him flourishes and grows.

In the abysmal darkness and hushed, star-spangled silence of the desolate place with the absolute most terrible soil for plants, the flower of Spock grows, and it _thrives_.

I.

In direct opposite to a pervasively popular shipwide belief to the contrary, she knows that not only can he smile, but that the aforementioned smile is perhaps the loveliest spectacle under any given sun.

It takes a protracted four years in the academy and two on the ship for said expression to at long last reveal itself, and when her painstaking efforts culminate so that the smile ultimately comes into radiant fruition, she realizes that she has been dismally unaware of what wonder was being missed. Before that time, his smiles could not be justly referred to as smiles- merely as a miniscule curvature at the corner of his delectably bow-shaped lips when amused, and to the naked, untrained eye, the inadvertent, decisively non-Vulcan gesture would have remained unnoticed.

"Come on, Spock," Jim Kirk had wheedled plaintively one year into their mission during an ill-advised late-night session of truth or dare, drunk enough that his sapphire eyes smoldered even more luminously than usual and his tongue was loose, but not drunk enough to dampen his silly, juvenile foolishness. "You picked dare and the dare was to smile. I know you've got it in you somewhere, you repressed bastard."

She fairly burned with ire at the captain's all-too familiarly course, callously insensitive treatment of her lover, but she wisely abstained from the scathing remark that she had wished to vocalize ever since it became inappropriate when he was awarded his captaincy. She could feel Spock next to her on the puffy floor cushion, the warm heat of his broad shoulder brushing against her own downright intoxicating beneath the harsh, cold light of the recreation room. His erect posture was held even stiffer with tension than usual, a distress signal if there ever was one that the situation had become exceedingly uncomfortable to him, but she felt as though extracting him from the room was impossible.

"I am fully aware of the decision I have executed and of its consequences, although I fail to recognize the value of this 'team-building exercise,' as you have so ineptly termed it," he responded coolly, impassive face betraying nothing of the mounting discomfort that she could feel in his body, tense as a taut bowstring.

"We know what you think of this 'team-building exercise,'" Jim said flatly, his slurred voice cross and impatient, eyes impossibly bright. "You've said it at least three times already. Now, come on!"

"Yeah, come on!" Chekov encouraged in echo, strung with excitement like a puppy nipping at the heels of its owner after having been alone for a great duration of time.

She was fully certain that the sudden escape of Spock's breath was the facsimile of a heavy, long-suffering sigh, although he would have argued otherwise had he not been previously engaged. "You are aware that members of my race have neither the use nor the need to smile, for it is an illogical emotional reaction, and therefore the result of this 'dare' may not be what you perceive as a smile," he began slowly, clearly stalling, more a tentative question than a statement.

"Absolutely," Sulu interjected, hurried and hasty, his skin suffused a deep magenta due to alcohol. "Now, get on with it!"

She subtly extended a hand around him, stroking the rigid, lean muscles in the small of his back in a firm demonstration of support. Both the tension in his body and the apprehension that radiated from him seemed to soften at her touch, and with that, his lips curved into an unsightly parody of a smile, teeth bared less into an expression of anything resembling a reflection of happiness and more into a predatory snarl.

The three men opposite them howled with raucous laughter, and while she knew full well that their reaction was caused in part due to having imbibed too much alcohol and that their intention was not to mock or ridicule, she couldn't help but hate them for the moment when the peaked tips of Spock's ears flushed a hot emerald and his hard, dark eyes snapped to the floor.

That expression had been ugly and feral, but his natural smile is incandescent and radiant, pure and unadulterated as it beautifully illuminates the handsome, angular planes of his face. His smile could be referred to as nothing other than a smile, for it was neither humored enough to be a grin nor rakish enough to constitute a smirk, but it was dazzlingly beautiful and youthfully dewy for its innocence and purity. Like his private, protective affection, his infrequent smiles are justly earned rather than freely dispensed, all the more virtuously beatific for their rarity.

She saw it first in the wake of an away mission gone awry, long after she found herself sprawled chaotically across the rocky terrain of a worthless hunk of violence-ridden space rock masquerading as a civilized planet. Her vision was unpleasantly awash with hazy crimson like haphazard splotches of red paint jettisoned carelessly across a pristine canvas, the calamitous pandemonium of phaser fire and Jim Kirk shouting hoarsely into his communicator deafening and thunderous within her ringing ears. The circumstances were fairly wrought with confusion and therefore impossible to make mental order of, even when Spock all but threw himself to the reddish, gravelly dust beside her.

"It shall soon be over," he assured soothingly, ducking his head beneath the bedlam, his characteristically even tone punctuated by a shockingly vulnerable connotation of panicked concern as his steady hands carded through her dark hair, tangled into ratty knots and matted with fresh blood. Her vision swam sickeningly despite his comforting ministrations, blood gushing from the torn edges of a head wound nestled in her hairline to trickle liberally down her face and into her eyes, obliterating any desire to visually witness the tumultuous mayhem rapidly unfolding before them.

She wanted nothing more than to stay awake and to assure him that her injuries were inconsequential so as to eliminate the frightening disquiet in his anxious dark eyes, to provide evidence substantial enough to ease the unsettling, never-before-heard note of fretful concern in his wavering voice as it cracked apprehensively. However, all her want was for nothing as the torn, bloody wound annihilated her heartfelt wishes, and she lost her tenuous, fragile grip on the turbulent panorama of bloodshed.

When she next endeavored to open her eyes, it was to the dim lighting of a blessedly private room in sickbay, various medical apparatuses chiming sibilantly above the uncomfortably firm bed. Her head ached with a dull intensity that not even the blatantly excessive stack of downy pillows upon which she was propped could alleviate, but the visual of an overwhelmingly devoted Vulcan dozing in a chair at her side with his head at her hip and his fingers twined within hers was so humbling that she found she did not care.

She lifted a hand that felt all too heavy from beneath the warm weight of his protective palm, slightly disappointed when the seemingly electric energy between their fingers vanished at the lack of direct contact. Her palm fell comfortably onto the sleek expanse of his charcoal hair, more tousled and windswept than she could ever recall having previously seen it, carding affectionately through the thick, glossy tresses. He was hunched into an impossibly uncomfortably position, doubled at the waist and bent at the shoulder to awkwardly rest his head at her hip in a heartbreakingly loyal fashion, slack, slumbering face pillowed upon artfully folded arms.

"Spock," she whispered gently, tenderly stroking the tip of one aesthetically peaked ear. She was astonished that her wakeful state of consciousness had not lapped at the edges of their passionate bond to rouse him, not to mention flabbergasted that her soft touch failed to incur a response- both were surely a testament to a formidable amount of concerned, weary exhaustion.

The dark crescents of his feathery eyelashes fluttered against ashen skin as snowy as the moon's luminous surface, lifting to reveal analytical coffee-colored eyes no less alert than any other circumstance. He lifted his head from his pillowed arms, the stiff joints of his back cracking in a sickening dissonance as he drew himself to an erect seated posture. "Nyota?" he wondered aloud almost lazily, and if asked to recall the specific circumstances of the tale, she would pinpoint his exact utterance of her name as the rainshower before the revelation of the radiant sun from behind the parting clouds, the hushed obscurity before the brilliant miracle of a blinding supernova.

When his eyes fell upon her, whole and healthy and decisively _not dead_, his lips helplessly curved into an unbidden upturned expression, no longer an animalistic snarl but rather a dazzlingly beautiful visual of even white teeth and utterly gratified illumination. It subtracted years from his face of which she had never before taken notice, an expression of absolute, immaculate purity and resplendent, unadulterated elation that lit up his eyes like a beacon epitomizing safety in a murky harbor. It was so utterly lovely and brilliantly, vivaciously effervescent that it was as if a match had been struck, shedding light upon a dark room to thoroughly illuminate just how truly dark it had once been.

"I am elated to be certain of your safety," he announced in what she assumed was the most passionate tone his voice could reach, fervent and rock solid and beautifully true. He lunged forward to embrace her, the movement uncharacteristically impulsive, his arms enveloping her shoulders with a strength that fostered a sensation of affectionate warmth and safety deep within her, their bodies pressed flush against one another so that her heart beat against his chest and his thrummed in a steady, soothing cadence against the lowest sector of her ribcage. She felt safe, anchored, protected, venerated, utterly, genuinely, truly _loved_.

When he pulled away after what felt like far too short a time, hands gripping her forearms with a gentle pressure as though he were afraid to let her go, the luminous smile had faded from his lips, but its incandescent warmth remained to sparkle tenderly within his velvety dark eyes. She found herself suddenly missing what had filled a previously unnoticed absence, aching for that glowing smile so like its own individual sun in and of itself. She wanted him never to change, to smile for all eternity or until kingdom come, whichever arrived first, to remain as infinitely perfect as he had been in that instance.

But, as much as she loved the immeasurable beauty of his smile, she loved the quiet strength of his solitude, the elegant finesse of his calculated mind, the warm embers of devotion that glowed within his eyes day and night.

"Spock?" she said, patting the empty space on the mattress to encourage him to occupy it. He obeyed willingly, his rigid posture at long last some semblance of relaxed when she laid her head against his firm chest, his body feverishly hot against her own.

"Yes, Nyota?" he answered expectantly, his tone communicative of the fact that he would follow her to the farthest reaches of the universe, if only she were to ask.

"Thank you," she said warmly, eyes closed against the relentless pounding in her head, drowsiness washing over her in hot, heavy waves as she could think of no better place in which to fall asleep.

"I do not believe that I am aware of what I have done to warrant your gratitude," he answered, one long-fingered, pianist's hand stroking up and down her back soothingly.

"'S'not important," she slurred drowsily. "Just… thank you."

She could almost sense the amused shine to his unfathomable dark eyes, the ever so slight uplift at the corner of his perfectly bow-shaped lips that wasn't a smile, but was beautiful and lovely and _enough_ all the same. "In that case, I suppose that you are quite welcome."

But it was important. It was everything and nothing and anything else in between, something for which she longed to resurface in moderation but never in excess, elsewise its extraordinary radiance would become far too commonplace for something so heavenly and flawless. She didn't want to live in wait for it, to hope so ardently that it her idealized perception of it cheapened the actuality.

As she dropped off to dream of sandy, sparsely wooded savannas stretching endlessly to deep azure oceans as infinite as the eye could see and of a lean body with skin like winter's first snow pressed against her with smoldering heat, she knew that her inhibitions were vainly foolish.

She always hopes for even the basest glimpse of that radiant smile, and no matter how often it appears, it will forever and always be faithfully, wholly, absolutely _wonderful_.

II.

Everything that he knows about love, he learned from his mother.

She knows that he misses her like the brilliant sun is doomed to perpetually yearn for the luminous moon, that the guilt associated with her death eats him alive like acid eradicates a soft material in the space of seconds, that he grasps at even the most ephemeral memories of her like a drowned man clinging to blessed shore so as not to lose a shred of what she left behind, that he lies unsleeping at her side each night agonizing over what went wrong, what _he_ did wrong, how he could have saved her.

She thought that he didn't understand, and the cynical skeptic within her that she so often wished into nonexistence clandestinely suspected that he _couldn't_ understand. He was thoroughly black and white, composed of sharp, steadfast edges of certainty in what he could prove to be real, and his calculated assurance in the sprawling, straightforward world that he knew did not allow for the illogical dynamo of raw, anguished heartbreak escalating beneath a composed exterior. He was so emotionally introverted that he did not rise to the bait of her subtle inquisition, but she suspected that he did not understand the excruciating hurt pervading an intimate part of him that he never knew could feel, let alone know how to confront that searing agony, and so he allowed it to fester, a bloody, untreated wound careening toward infection.

What Jim Kirk had so impudently accused him of ripped an abysmal, gaping hole in the tender heart that so many believed to be cold and fallow, a hole as vast as a rocky crater stretching before miniscule explorers like an infinite, otherworldly plain. His performance remained characteristically admirable, but his touch was hollow and cold, his brow eternally knotted with lost confusion, his dark eyes directionless, searching, _hurt_. He was not unlike a child experiencing emotional trauma for the first time in a lifetime- he simply _didn't understand_, and being unable to soothe as though her hands were metaphorically bound behind her back was agonizing.

Jim Kirk had been wrong.

She knows that he had loved his mother, and she knows that the flawless, unadulterated integrity of his unconditional love has transcended her tragic death. He never speaks of his love for her, for he is not one to vocalize the few feelings that he dares to acknowledge, but his actions speak far louder than even the most poetic of words ever could. She knows from the way that he proudly wears the awful sweaters that she knitted for him with affection many years ago, the way he lovingly handles the vellum pages of her leather-bound books, the way his dark eyes linger on a holovid of her lovely smile for just a second too long, the way he makes a goddess out of what little remains of her.

He was trying to let her go, but the pull of the universe and the newfound ache in his heart was simply too great. There was goodbye, and then there was _goodbye_.

Two weeks had passed in such a surreptitiously melancholy fashion that she was not astonished in the least to find him absent from their shared quarters at the time when they usually crawled beneath the sheets. He had developed a sudden propensity to roam the halls at times of exponentially anguished emotional duress, a directionless wanderlust to outrun the crushed shards of a heart that he wouldn't admit was broken.

She found him on the observation deck, his back pressed to the wall of corrugated steel as though he had taken a moment to lean against the surface and instead slid down onto the tile in a helpless puddle of lost, throbbing heartache. His long legs were extended before him and crossed elegantly at the booted ankle in an amusingly pragmatic fashion, slim hands folded demurely in his lap, head tilted backward against the paneled wall with closed eyes that allowed for the graceful, childlike sweep of long lashes against alabaster cheeks. To the untrained eye, he would appear the very epitome of peaceful, contemplative solitude, but the ever so slight etching in the unblemished porcelain between his prominent brows spoke volumes of a turbulent internal tempest that she could no longer allow to tear at him.

Although her footsteps were more than audible enough to announce her presence, his eyes remained stubbornly closed. She found herself taking notice of an odd sensation of awkward discomfort rising insecurely within her, the likes of which she had never before experienced in their relationship. "If you want to be alone, I'll leave," she offered tentatively.

He was as stagnant and rigid as a marble statue, voice clipped and impassive. "Your presence is not entirely dissatisfying," he stated matter-of-factly. "If you wish to stay, do not allow my solitude to impede you."

She did not need to be told twice, and there was no hesitation in her movement when she slid to a seated position at his side. She crept close enough that the lean, sinewy line of his leg was buttressed by the smooth, feminine curve of her own, his smoldering heat transmitted from the tender brush of the hard muscle of his shoulder, dazzling, far-flung stars twinkling mysteriously as they reflected backward from their inky canvas in an incandescent pull of blurred light. Despite the quietly intimate contact, those heartbreaking wells of unfathomably profound loss remained shuttered from view, but she considered it a small victory when he did not shy away from her.

They remained silent for a comfortable interval of time, she content to provide tacit solace and he content to accept it, an amiable intimacy of understanding shared between them, but when his voice at last rose like a foreign stranger in the vast hush of space's lonely vacuum, it was rough and fracturing with each syllable, hoarse and vulnerable and so infinitely _sad_.

"Nyota, do you believe that she was aware that I… loved her?" Faltering and tremulous, mystified as to the impossibly passionate, enigmatic ideal of _love_.

Her heart ached for the man beside her, the man who loved so blindly and so naïvely, the man she loved blindly in return, the man who so blindly navigated feeling, who blindly gave without question and never understood how to receive. His love was honest and unpretentious, true and heartfelt and utterly, hopelessly _blind_.

She shifted to more directly confront him, clasping one hand warm and dry as a sweltering African dune firmly within her own, tenderly cupping the smooth, youthful skin of his marbled cheek in the other. His eyes at last opened at her commanding touch, gleaming feverishly with blind, uninhibited _feeling_.

"Spock," she insisted, his fingers wrapped around hers with bruising strength as though she embodied salvation from the abyss of sorrow, her voice impassioned and steady and poignant. "Of course she knew. You never had to prove it. A mother always knows."

He blinked sporadically, lashes suspiciously damp and glistening, an impenetrable barrier at last crumbling to leave him vulnerable, exposed, eviscerated. When he spoke again, his voice trembled and broke like a thin reed in the midst of a tumultuous gale.

"How could she? She professed her love for me every day, and I never once vocalized the same to her. How could she be assured of its validity when I was unable to so much as reciprocate?"

She tightened her grip on his slender hand, tenderly brushing an errant drop of moisture from his eyelashes with the pad of her thumb as his breath hitched and stuttered in his chest. The hushed, jeweled darkness of the infinite heavens continued to refract luminous starlight and usher them into faraway frontiers, but surely the universe was ending as they spoke, because he was crying, _he was crying_, and she didn't know what to say that could possibly make that okay.

"Even if you didn't say it, you didn't need to," she began with mounting conviction as his eyes sparkled with tears that he didn't know how to shed. "If I know you, I know that you showed her every single day."

He gripped her forearms firmly and she returned the gesture, his electric touch heartrendingly urgent and his eyes tearily insistent as his voice wavered treacherously.

"I strongly dislike feeling… this way," he mused aloud shakily, his characteristically resolute voice crumbling with each syllable. "If it could be termed 'feeling.' Is this what feeling is like, Nyota? I have expended a lifetime attempting not to feel, and I desire to succeed, if only just this once, if only to just _stop feeling_."

She stroked his arms affectionately, voice pitched low and soothing. "There is no shame in feeling, Spock."

"My home is gone and my people with it," he continued unthinkingly as though she had not spoken at all, sorrowful and shattered, chest hitching, eyes gleaming. "I am now a member of an endangered species. The only woman who ever loved me is dead. You are all I have left, Nyota."

Her heart ached for him, so wretchedly _sad_, so unable to understand, so _blind_. He was thick-headed, naïve, oblivious, and at once wholeheartedly, unconditionally, entirely generous with his love, private and privileged as it was, and yet she wondered how so brilliant a man could be so utterly obtuse to fail to recognize what had been right in front of him all along.

She trailed her hands down the wiry muscle of his pallid forearms, twining their slender fingers in an affecting, electric kiss that ignited the nerves of her hands and lit a fire beneath what she had yet to tell him.

"I am not all you have left," she reasoned, tender amber eyes locked with heartbroken coffee, her tone affectionate and warmhearted and true. "And your mother is not the only woman who ever loved you."

It was the first time either of them had said it.

His sorrowful dark eyes transitioned into an expression of utterly genuine truth and absolute beauty, illuminated in the light of recent events, a moment of perfect clarity, transcendental sincerity, unadulterated, unabashed, unconditional _love_.

He said nothing, but it wasn't necessary, because this was enough, because she had learned long ago not to expect poetry from him, and the hushed, climactic silence was worth far more than the words.

When he leaned forward to bury his tear-streaked face in her shoulder seconds later, she threw her arms wholeheartedly around his broad, heaving shoulders, and she silently avowed never to speak of his tears to anyone as she stroked the peaked tips of his ears and carded a comforting hand through thick ebony hair. She was never one to hope for too much, but she thought that it wasn't unfeasible to hope that he hadn't given up on feeling just yet.

On the first anniversary of his mother's birth since her tragic demise, she finds herself seated on a fluffy floor pillow across from him at a low table in the dim, darkened confines of his heated quarters, tranquil and candlelit. Under the influence of the amorous, ambient light, his dark eyes are something akin to melted chocolate, warm and nostalgic, evocatively reminiscent of wistful longing and remembrance, not of loss and sadness.

After they toast with a vile, bitter wine that he insists is highly valuable and therefore difficult to procure, she takes a moment to reach across the strange Vulcan cuisine between them and clasp his hand, her touch and his reciprocation equally firm, her voice serious and heartfelt when she says, "I may never have met her, Spock, but I know that she was proud of you. Wherever she is, she's always proud of you."

His lip curves ever so slightly in amusement, but it's everything of which he needs to be assured, a knowing jest twinkling in the dark eyes that she never wants to see look so infinitely crushed and heartbroken ever again. "Nyota, the fundamental theory of a supernatural afterlife is highly ill-"

She reaches across the narrow table to press her fingers to his lips and effectively silence the predicted rebuttal as the candlelight causes fleeting shadows to play across the sharp planes of his face, the soft skin blisteringly hot and yielding beneath her touch. His eyes are velvety and utterly doe-like, affectionate and teeming wholly with sincere, steadfast adoration.

"All the same," she refutes firmly. "She's proud of you. She always was."

When he leans forward to press his silenced lips to hers in a kiss as smoldering as a desert storm and as unwaveringly steady as a lighthouse on a rocky shore lashed by turbulent seas, she accepts the gesture as acquiescence to this undeniable law of a mother's love and tugs urgently at the hem of his uniform. What better way to commemorate Amanda Grayson than to fulfill what was surely her lifelong wish- the happiness of her only son?

Jim Kirk had been wrong.

He loved his mother. He still does. He always will.

That much, she knows is true.

III.

One would not suspect the existence of an imaginative subconscious within arguably the most pragmatic and analytical of realists known to the universe, but although he would be shamelessly mortified if he were to discover her nocturnal activities, she knows all that she needs to from watching his brow furrow and his hands spasmodically clench as they lie side by side in the artificial night. She knows that he dreams when a shadowy hush settles across the ship, and _oh_, how he dreams, his lips as unobtrusively silent as ever while his body fairly screams with tension and dissonance.

During the three academy years before they at last fell into an amorous liaison, she found a trick to while away the dull time of his few lessons that were too perfunctory for her superior intellect or too tedious to enjoy how his beautiful mouth shaped the exotic words, and she spent that time girlishly indulging in an all-too domestic fantasy.

Her jaw pillowed by the heel of her hand as he droned through monotonous verb conjugations that she had learned years before, she appraised his lean, sinewy silhouette and envisioned that rigid body at rest, sumptuous sheets tangled around a trim waist and muscled abdomen, noble face languid and charcoal hair tousled to fan across abundant pillows, one arm of coiled strength draped across the enchanting rise and fall of his flawless marble chest and the other cast across the rumpled sheets, long fingers lax and snowy palm upward as though beckoning her forward. Luminous moonlight spilling across his tranquil form, she would crawl up the bed to straddle him with her calves buttressing the sharp, alluring lines of his hipbones, her hands pressed to frame his head on the pillows, and when he inevitably came awake, slow and languorous with drowsy dark eyes that made her knees tremble, he would roll to reverse their position, all hard, leonine angles of muscle in the otherworldly light, his hot body and hot mouth crushed to hers-

"Uhura," the cadet to her left had whispered, nudging her with a well-placed elbow. "Are you getting these notes?"

In actuality, his sleep is nothing like she had envisioned as a dreamy, licentious cadet lusting after the alluring intelligence of the forbidden professor. Much to her disappointment (although not in the least unsurprising, for he is decisively unadventuresome), he does not sleep in the nude as she had imagined, and though she attempts to reenact that age-old daydream beneath solitary starry skies thousands of light years away from where it had first taken shape, her schemes are met not with the passionate desire she had once hoped for, but rather by curious amusement and inhumanly articulate requests to please dismount him so that he may reach his full quota of required sleep.

What he calls sleep is less a peaceful slumber than it is a dead faint, not at all unlike a machine switched off to recharge its batteries overnight. It is devoid of anything resembling the characteristic restlessness of human slumber, his lithe, agile body unmoved from the position in which he first lays down, stretched comfortably onto his side with sensitive, long-fingered hands cushioned on the pillow inches before his lax face. His stance is endearingly childlike, and for the entire duration of the experimental period in which she lies awake anxiously awaiting the barest twitch so as to prove that he is asleep rather than unconscious, he unknowingly thwarts her scheme by remaining stationary and silent.

When she is certain that her restless behavior will not disturb him (for she would be mortified were he to wake and find her examining his slumbering form like a subject of dissection), she tentatively reaches out in the inky, eternal darkness to lay an affectionate hand on the heated skin at the base of his ribcage. His chest rises and falls with the serene shape of his breath in an unfailingly steady cadence beneath her hand, his heart throbbing honest and loyal, brilliant and balanced and true.

Just as she knows his heart so intimately, she feels his mind lapping helplessly at the edges of her own, his dreams characteristically scattered and chaotic, the expansive landscape of his psyche heartrendingly yearning and guilty. His mind fairly trembles with the weight of a heartbreaking, poignantly intense longing that threatens to wash her away like a thunderous tidal wave inundated with debris, his chaotic heart vibrating with a wretched, insidious guilt that tears at the sanctity of his soul and burrows into the most private, hallowed crevices of his mind. He dreams of turmoil and calamity, of rockslides and coppery red dust, of cool, feminine hands and forgiving brown eyes.

If there is anything that she dislikes about their relationship, blossoming and evolving in unprecedented ways with each day that passes, it is that he can read her like a vulnerable open book when he is so infuriatingly and mysteriously closed. She loves the fusion of their minds as one, the buoyant union of their hearts effortlessly interlocking like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, but she hates that the very essence of her being can be laid bare to him with no more than a delicate touch when she cannot do the same. She wants to _know_ him as intimately as he knows her, and awful as it is, being privy to the grief-stricken nocturnal recesses of his deepest, most private subconscious does not make it right, but her clandestine ritual makes it fair.

And so, she feels his dreams under the dark cover of artificial night, and she _knows_ him more closely than she could ever have wished for. He dreams of arid desert air and majestic mountains looming on the richly hued horizon of a world lost to the sands of time, of spiteful children and social exile that twists him up with a gut-wrenching sense of being dreadfully out of place, of inconceivable equations and climactic battles on far-flung planets, of subdued fondness with his father and adoring, transcendent light with his mother.

She feels everything that he feels just as intensely as she believes him to feel it- the pressure of his exceptional intellect that causes her head to ache, the agonizing guilt of not doing enough in her empty hands that grasp at someone slipping through her fingers, the crushing bereavement of having lost everything nestled into the pit of her stomach, even the breathtaking, awe-inspiring force of love that lights an everlasting fire beneath her heart.

She is humbled to find that he dreams of her, and she blushes in the hushed darkness. When he dreams of her, there is love and familiarity, intimacy and absolute faith, understanding and a tender, all-encompassing warmth that very nearly bowls her over with its divine, virtuous loveliness. He envisions her smile, which she could never have believed to look so radiant to another person, her voice as it shapes the words of his homeland, never so mellifluous and honeyed to her own ears, even her eyes as she observes him, warmer than they've ever been when staring back at her in the frosted bathroom mirror.

His dreams of her are not always so virginal. They are nervously wrought with insecurity and self-doubt, shaped by an intensely pervasive desire to impress and a need to _feel_ to ensure that she understands him, wracked not with the fear of love, for he embraces that feeling wholeheartedly, but with a gut-wrenching terror of losing her. He reaches out to her in his dreams like a moth seeking reprieve from the oily dark of night by adhering to a welcoming porch light, almost as though he recognizes her secret intrusion, clinging to her like a half-drowned Odysseus clinging to the demolished wreckage of his raft.

It is one such dream that brings her nocturnal activities to a deafening crescendo. Her hand draped over his devoted heart, throbbing soundly at the base of his chest, she finds him kneeling in the long grasses of a foreign planet, thunderous, torrential rain lashing the lush vegetation and soaking him to the bone with a preternatural chill, the sky dark and tempestuous. She is lying limply in his strong arms, an ugly, awful wound gouged into her chest beneath the torn crimson fabric of her uniform, his shaking hands saturated in scarlet lifeblood that smears her face when he fervently strokes her cheek. They are alone, just the two of them, desolately, wretchedly alone as the heavens erupt.

"Nyota," he begs urgently, voice choked and broken. She can feel the devastating despair that emanates from him in heavy, sorrowful waves, the hopeless anguish, the bereaved, inconsolable heartbreak, the awful, agonizing feeling that the world as he knows it is ending. "Please, don't leave. Don't leave me. Please."

She is abruptly wrenched from his dreamscape with the sensation of being torn in two when he comes awake with a violent start to shoot into a seated position, panting so rapidly that his chest heaves as though having just completed a marathon and her hand falls uselessly to her lap. His dark eyes are wild and distraught as he leaps into motion almost instantly, his hands pawing at her chest to ensure that the gruesome wound is nonexistent before his focus shifts to her face, caressing her cheek frantically to wipe away blood that is not there. He stares at her as though she is the only thing that makes logical sense to him, and she can't help but wonder if that isn't true.

Assured that she is unharmed, he seems almost embarrassed, eyes flickering in uncomfortable, downcast humiliation to his lap. He reaches for her hand hesitantly as though too timid to ask for the contact but too discomfited not to, and, wanting nothing more than to put him at ease as the nagging feeling that she has seen something she was not intended to see surmounts, she clasps his hand firmly between both of her own.

"I am sorry, Nyota," he whispers apologetically, his face beautifully colored with an emerald blush. "It was not my intention to disturb your rest. I promise that it shall not happen again."

"You have nothing to apologize for," she insists firmly in hushed tones, leaning forward to envelop his warm frame in her arms. He comes without argument, and her stomach churns to know that she has invaded his privacy, that she is so cowardly to be unable to admit it, that he loves her with such frightening, tremendous strength.

She does not question him as to the cause of his disturbance, and if he notices this peculiarity, he says nothing.

She doesn't feel his dreams anymore. She knows all that she needs to.

IV.

Heartless. Cold. Unfeeling. Aloof. Inhuman.

She is not immune to the venomous gossip in the corridors, no matter how much she wishes to be. The words are born of ignorance and antiquated prejudice, toxic and malevolent as they are, dripping with noxious, disdainful venom like saccharine, sickly-sweet honey. They say that he has no heart, that he is no more than a robotic machine programmed with equations and statistics, that he could not feel even if he wanted to. Their rancorous words make her angrier than she has ever been, so livid that she sees red, and although she wastes no time in brutally reprimanding them for their disrespect, she takes pride in the privilege of knowing better. Their words cannot taint what she knows to be true- she knows that he feels, and that he feels more deeply than humans do.

She is not at all intimidated or afraid to meld with him- she never has been, even when his hand first descended to her face in the candlelit confines of his chambers at the academy. The prospect of being absolutely one with the man she loves is exhilarating and heady, the fusion of mind, heart, and soul an invigorating, transcendent high from which she never wishes to come down, enlightening her as to the private intricacies of his spirit, his psyche, his very essence.

They sit with folded legs across from one another on the bed in her quarters, lavish sheets pooled beneath them as they sit close enough that their knees brush ever so slightly, she in her underwear with her long hair let down in relaxation and he clothed only in boxers at her brazen suggestion. The sterile white light of the wall sconces is perpetually distasteful to her and so she keeps them turned off, the bedroom plunged into intimate darkness in which his eyes are the only source of luminescence as they continue to glow like the embers of a blazing inferno despite the shadows.

"Are you certain that you wish to proceed, Nyota?" he questions sincerely, handsome face composed into a still expression of utter seriousness.

She gives a kindhearted sigh of exasperation. "I'm sure. You don't have to ask me that every time, Spock," she chides. Although she teases him otherwise, his meticulous care is rather endearing.

His mouth twists into that amused facsimile of an almost-smile. "I merely wish to be certain that your feelings have not changed in regard to this procedure."

"They haven't," she assures. "They won't. I promise."

"I infer that you are speaking about more than solely the meld?" he responds.

"It is possible."

It is not a whole smile, but his mouth curves into an incandescent, brief flash of teeth nonetheless, as beautiful as the blessed light of a nearby inn after a long night of traveling through a tumultuous gale. "Then, let us begin," he instructs.

His fingers are hot and soothing against the skin of her cheek and temple, handling her with all the delicate care with which he would handle spun glass, his touch fleeting and soft. His entry into her mind is like honey poured into placid water, fluid and graceful, warm and tender and adoring. It feels as though she is being eviscerated and yet at the same time illuminated by the interlocking of their separate beings, two united halves of a spiritual whole, her soul being laid completely and vulnerably bare at the mercy of the one she loves, but there is no doubt whatsoever, for she knows that he will support it without hesitation.

His mind is coolness and serenity, a state of inner tranquility and balance the likes of which a full-blooded human could never so much as dream to achieve, shaped by his brilliant, quicksilver thoughts and visionary intellect. She loves the graceful finesse of his intelligence, the dazzling virtuosity to his thought, but above all else, his mind is strength. It is understated and quiet but overwhelming all the same, intense and steady, fervent and powerful and extraordinarily _strong_, like a wise, ancient tree held fast in the damp earth throughout a turbulent tempest.

She wonders what he senses from her when their minds are intertwined, and she belatedly realizes from his halfhearted sensation of amusement that she cannot hide her insecurity from him in such an intimate connection. Does he understand how ardently she wished that he would take romantic notice of her during her time spent at the academy before he at last expressed hard-won interest? Does he sense how she secretly hates the shape of her nose, the knobbiness of her knees? Does he understand how much she loves him and just how much it terrifies her?

She knows from experience that melds are about feeling, not seeing. While the beautiful amalgamation of their minds allows her to see what he has seen and perceive it as he perceives it, it is more a communication of feeling and exchange of emotion than it is a private rendezvous in the intimate space of an ephemeral mental plane. Nor is it limited to solely a union of the minds- the experience of wholly transcending one's being to embrace another could only be described as a fusion of the hearts.

Although she had never ascribed to the spiteful drivel of those who maliciously insisted that he was incapable of emotion, she had never before expected such an unfathomable, infinite well of feeling to spring forth from within him like a mountain river, strong and fast-paced. His heart is resplendent and dazzling but at the same time conflicted, troubled by a wealth of emotions with which he can do naught more but feel.

When he thinks of his mother, there is radiance and affection, cool hands stroking his hair in the arid night, wholehearted, beaming smiles that illuminate a beautiful face and convey the promise of the adventuresome possibility of thrillingly foreign traditions like birthday cakes and Halloween costumes, all wrought with guilt and regret but illuminated by adoration all the same. Of his father there is strength and reservation, an affection far more aloof than his mother's but no less wholehearted, discipline and self-control, information and statistics and books, equations and numbers and data that feed his smoldering thirst for knowledge.

Of his home there is familiarity and endless rocky plains as far as the eye can see, cloudless gray skies and powdery dust tinted red with iron oxide, comfort and experience, gut-wrenching guilt and apology, structure and learning, logic and doing anything but feeling.

Of Jim there is luminosity and vitality brighter than any given sun, a fire hard and bright, curiosity and stimulating chess games in dimly lit chambers, disastrous away missions spent huddled in rocky alcoves with a dying body against his chest and scarlet blood on his hands, camaraderie and _adventure_ and friendship above all else.

Of space there is solitude and serendipity, quantum physics and timelessly black perpetuities pinpointed with radiantly glowing stars, desolation and endless infinities spiraling out of themselves like beautifully intricate folds of origami, danger and exhilarating exploration, possibility and potential and _promise_.

Of her there is devotion and absolute faith, affectionate fidelity and the humbled sensation of being unconditionally supported, silky ebony hair and honeysuckle shampoo, strange Terran foods and unfathomable trust, incandescence and beauty, adoration and hopeful belief, tremendous warmth and profound, awe-inspiring, breathtaking _love_.

He begins to pull away, a slow ascension from the mysterious, cavernous depths of his mind. It always strikes her as a decisively unpleasant experience, for it feels as though she is being separated from a fundamental part of her being, but when his hand lifts from her face and she opens her eyes to a face illuminated by levity and adoration, it is as though she has lost nothing.

"That was an exceptionally revealing experience," he murmurs, and from the lighthearted sparkle in his eye and the curve at his lips, she knows that his understated sense of humor is surfacing.

"It was indeed," she agrees, and she means every word of it.

"I was not aware of your abhorrence for the shape of your knees," he jests, one long-fingered hand extending to cup the body part in question and stroke it affectionately.

"Don't even joke," she warns, leaning forward into his touch, still seated across from him with folded legs.

"Vulcans do not joke," he responds evenly, still with those humorous, shimmering eyes. "And even if we did, I would not jest about your knees, for there is nothing dissatisfactory about them. I believe them to be exquisite as they are."

"Are you flirting with me, Commander?" she teases, wrapping her hand around his in a thrilling kiss as she leans intimately close to his face, their breath mingling.

"Perhaps, Lieutenant," he replies gamely, eyes glowing.

"In that case…" she breathes teasingly, capturing his lips with hers in a smoldering kiss, one hand tangled in his hair and the other tucked provocatively into his waistband, a girlish squeal of surprise escaping her when he pushes her to a supine position and crawls to straddle her hips.

Even if no one else does, she understands him. He _does_ feel, and he feels with a passionate intensity the likes of which she has never experienced, but his emotions are all the more deep and profound because he does not act upon them, because they fester like an untended wound.

Adoring. Affectionate. Brilliant. Pure. Loving.

Those words describe his heart better than any others could, and she knows that not only does he feel, but he feels every last one of them.

V.

If there is anything that Nyota Uhura knows about Spock, it is that he loves her.

He never tells her. She thinks that he doesn't know how to shape the words, how to vocalize what he has spent a lifetime being repressed so as not to show, how to breathe life into what he feels more profoundly than any other emotion, but it doesn't matter. She knows that he loves her because she can see it in everything that he is and everything that he does.

She sees it in the way that he programs a sumptuous Jacuzzi holovid for her when she laments how much she misses drawing warm baths, in the way that he is willing to converse with her in any language she wishes no matter how tiresome it may be, in the way that he bestows the privileged honor of choosing her over his work, in the way that he has never broken any promise made to her and never will, in the way that he says "fascinating" to her almost like a reward, in the way that he would tear up heaven and any number of earths for her, if only she were to ask.

Any other woman would have reason to doubt his love, but she is not any other woman, and those women would simply be too blind to recognize the majesty of what they cannot see. She sees his love every day in the relaxation of his rigid posture at her touch and the look of trust when she lays down to sleep beside him, in the adoring glow of his dark eyes when they light upon her and the barely perceptible tenderness to his voice when they converse. She doesn't need to see into his mind to know that his feelings are there- the honest, unadulterated truth and passionate integrity of his love smolder just below his calculated surface, and she is delighted to be the only one that can see it.

She knows more about him than anyone else in the everlasting universe could ever hope to, but she realizes that she's only scratched the surface, and even though a hundred years wouldn't be nearly enough, she is utterly thrilled that she has a lifetime unfolding beautifully before her like the petals of a vibrant flower to learn the rest.

All she knows is that they will be _amazing_, and with the inky heavens and the luminous stars as her witness, she's ready to begin.

-finis-

**A/N: Comments? Questions? Concerns? Reviews?**


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